Edward Dolnick

Edward Dolnick's latest concerns the story of how Egyptian hieroglyphs were first decoded in the early 19th century. Everyone has heard of the Rosetta stone that's no mystery. But Dolnick keeps it interesting throughout. The precise way hieroglyphs were decoded is a long story, it was not a eureka moment, or paper, or stone. Turns out they were exceptionally difficult to decipher from a cold start. It goes heavy into linguistics, but is easy to follow. It's also very good with Egyptian show more culture reinforcing how radically conservative it was, things didn't change much for thousands of years. Well written, livened with humor, interesting and new, educational and relevant, strong characters and narrative - this scores highly. show less

Years later when asked how he and other members of his party managed to be the first to take boats down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, John Wesley Powell replied simply, "I was lucky."

More than luck was involved, of course, yet Powell and the others certainly were lucky, as Edward Dolnick explains in his adventurous 2001 book “Down the Great Unknown.”

Consider that Powell himself, leader of the expedition, had but one arm, having lost the other in the Battle of show more Shiloh. Consider that their large wooden boats were totally unsuitable for running river rapids and and no less suitable for carrying around the worst of the rapids. Consider that the rowers faced backwards. Consider that none of the men wore lifejackets or helmets. Consider that, because they were the first, they had no idea what might be beyond the next curve in the river. Many others, including some in recent years, have died trying to go down this river. That Powell and the others succeeded in their first attempt had something to do with luck.

Most of the 10 men who started the 99-day, 1,000-mile river trip that started in Wyoming Territory were Civil War veterans. Having survived the war, they figured they could survive anything. They were all eager for adventure, although Powell himself was also in pursuit of science. He wanted to map the river and study geology along the way. Names he gave to rapids, canyons and other features along the way are still in use today.

Only six of the 10 completed the trip, the others bailing out along the way because of the hardships they endured. Powell was cautious, choosing to avoid the worst rapids whenever possible, but to his crew carrying those heavy boats long distances over rocks often seemed worse than taking their chances with the rapids.

Dolnick makes a nail-biting adventure story out of this river trip, describing what happened each day along the way. At the same time he tells us much about river rapids in general, about the Grand Canyon's history and geology and about others who have ventured down it. His book makes exciting and informative reading. show less

Edward Dolnick writes a kind of tabloid history, but his books are still enjoyable. This one slipped in several misleading bits. Dolnick does not seem to understand the difference between the regular word for something and a kenning in Scandinavian poetry. He believes that the word "discover" meant to uncover the things known already by the ancients; David Wootton believes that it had to be invented to mean find out something unknown to the ancients, as described in his book "The Invention show more of Science". A lot of Dolnick's analogies about decipherment and the succession of problems faced by Young, Champollion and their predecessors and successors are a bit misleading. Yet it's a great story, and quite remarkable to think of all those documents and stele and so forth, out there in front of everybody, bearing all this history, mythology, and so forth and never actually read for over a thousand years. show less

An entertaining and fast-moving historical narrative of the scientific revolution, including fascinating insights into the lives of luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and more.

There are many ways to make a science book dull. I’ve read my share of popular science that included either too many equations, too much biographical detail, or otherwise dry, lifeless writing. Not so with The Clockwork Universe.

The author gets the proportion of biography, science, show more and history exactly right, giving the reader the full picture of the people and culture of the times and also the revolutionary nature of the science itself. The writing is vibrant, succinct, and conveys just the right amount of scientific detail.

What was particularly interesting to me was how much of a struggle it was for humanity to escape the grips of superstition. The most prominent figure of the scientific revolution, Isaac Newton, was a deeply superstitious and spiritual man. We know him best for proposing the laws of motion and universal gravitation in his masterpiece, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, but it came as a surprise to learn that Newton spent more time on alchemy and analyzing scripture for secret messages, than he spent on physics.

It makes you wonder what he could have accomplished had he dedicated all his time to physics or another area of science. But he was, unfortunately, in addition to being a genius, a product of his times. As John Maynard Keynes wrote, “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

As a man of his times, his times were extremely superstitious. To begin with, belief in God was essentially mandatory and in large part fully rational. In fact, being an atheist in the 17th century would have been seen as irrational. We should remember that the 17th century was still 200 years before Darwin.

Without the theory of evolution, you had to believe one of two things, that either 1) humans were created or 2) humans have else always existed. Since option two was absurd, option one was taken for granted, and everyone knew that what is created requires a creator.

The idea that humans evolved from other species, to the degree that it even crossed anyone’s mind, wouldn’t have been convincing in the absence of evidence. No one knew the Earth was more than a few thousand years old, so there would not have been enough time for evolution to work even if the theory was accepted. (This is why Christopher Hitchens noted that, while Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, Darwin would go on to become the greater liberator.)

And so, creation, and the belief in God, was the default position. That type of thinking led quite naturally to a host of other beliefs I would label “trickle-down superstition”, including the existence of angels, witches, demonic possessions, and divine retribution for sin in the form of natural disasters and plagues.

So the real genius of the 17th century scientists was to see beyond all of this chaos and randomness to find order in the universe according to general laws. The irony is that Newton thought he was investigating the mind of God through these natural laws, but in reality he was forming the laws that would ultimately render God unnecessary.

This caused much disagreement. Newton, for example, claimed that God actively intervened in the universe because a universe without the need of intervention would diminish God’s will, while Leibniz argued that divine intervention in the universe would diminish God’s omniscience, implying that the universe was not created in perfect order in the first place. But neither man would dare come to the conclusion that perhaps there was no God at all, or else a God that, as Spinoza would claim, was synonymous with the universe or else didn’t concern itself with human affairs.

The dispute between Newton and Leibniz would introduce a troubling paradox of God’s omnipotence. It can be phrased as a question: is God powerful enough to create a universe in which any intervention would render it less perfect? If He could, then that would preclude any intervention, and if He could not intervene, then He is not all-powerful. And if He can’t create such a universe, then He is not all-powerful to begin with. You’ll note that this is a variation of the “Can God create a stone so heavy even He can’t lift it?” paradox.

And so the concept of omnipotence itself is seen as absurd and contradictory, and the idea of an all-powerful God, to which the medieval concept of God depended, is thus refuted.

Note that, today, you can still posit the existence of a creator if you’d like, but that it is not required to explain the workings of the universe or of life. You can claim that a creator had to at least craft the laws of physics, but this introduces more questions, the main one being who created the creator. Either way, God is now a possible but not necessary hypothesis.

And therein lies the ultimate irony of the scientific revolution: the mission to comprehend the mind of God found no God to comprehend. We’ve been dealing with the repercussions, both positive and negative, ever since. show less